If you’re looking to buy into more screen real estate for your Macintosh,  or find that a 14” tube just doesn’t suit you anymore, Apple has a new 
offering that should catch your eye.

The new 17” Multiple Scan is a marvel by industry standards. More and 
more third-party companies are releasing new screens that offer better 
resolution at a reduced price. Many of them are replacing the standards 
of Trinitron technology with new Toshiba and Phillips tubes. Others 
throw in ‘on-the-fly’ resolution switching in the form of software, or 
sleek industrial designs. Apple, on the other hand, refined the older 16” Color Display and added a subset of software and hardware controls and still kept the price very competitive.

The monitor itself resembles the older 16” Color Display. It has the same tilt/swivel base with included ADB & sound ports, the power-on switch is located on the front, and the tube case is quite similar. The only real changes are the controls, and the screen quality.

The first set of features that immediately strike you are the controls. Unlike previous Apple monitors which had simple controls (such as brightness, power, and contrast), this new class of display offers you 11 individual digital controls to adjust all aspects of screen distortion. If you find that the monitor display is in any way tilted, fuzzy or skewed, a few minutes with the digital controls and everything is corrected. You can even reset the controls back to factory defaults if you over adjusted it. 

As for the screen quality, it is very impressive. The monitor tube is the award-winning Sony Trinitron. The screen is noticeably brighter than the older 16”, and the screen is a much flatter as well. It looks as though the image is actually sitting on top of the glass, and not buried deep inside like most other cheap monitors. With it’s perfect focus at all points on the screen, a 24-bit image almost seems three dimensional and life-like.

One of the best features of this new monitor is that, depending on your machine’s Video RAM and monitor capabilities, you can switch screen resolutions. On the Power Macintosh 8100/80AV that it was tested on, the monitor could be set to 640x480, 832x624, and 1024x768. I found that at its highest screen size, the screen seemed to flicker a bit, even though the refresh rate is set at 75Hz. Setting the monitor at 640x480 is ideal for people who are visually impaired, or for people who want to display a multimedia presentation at full screen size.

There are still a few minor inconveniences with this monitor. Even though you can change resolutions, ‘on-the-fly’ switching is not possible unless you restart the Macintosh. Most other vendors offer software switching without the need of rebooting. The monitor is still quite heavy, weighing in at just over 50 pounds. Some Macs may not support this amount of pressure on their cases.

Apple’s newest offering can be purchased at any Apple Dealer or University Reseller for under $1500.00 Canadian. 

 

In every computer platform, there are always a set of programs  that prove the computer’s worthiness as a viable product and stand 
the tests of time. While most of these programs become very suc-
cessful and become the standard in their fields, others just endure 
in the form of multiple revisions and updates.

The release of the Macintosh II in 1987 brought with it new capab-
ilities and expansions that allowed for some very sophisticated new 
programs, such as digital sound editing. The revoultionary NuBus 
slots allowed for some fancy stereo sampling hardware and synthe-
sis boards, supported by breakthrough software applications. Along 
came SoundEdit and its counterpart, MacRecorder.

I bought a copy when it first came out. I only had a Mac Plus, but I used it on the Mac II that I had at work. It opened up new ideas and interests, and it also allowed me to create and sample sounds for other programs that I was working on. Little did I know that starting in 1991, Apple would build complete support for stereo sound recording into almost every Macintosh. The provided microphone and SoundEdit soon became inseparable halves. Then, in 1993, Apple released the 660av and 840av Macs which offered true 16-bit 48KHz stereo sound sampling with its included digital signal processor. 

As the race continued, the original creators of SoundEdit sold the program to Macromedia. The product then started to take new shapes, and it became much more refined and useful. At one point the product was re-released as SoundEdit Pro. MacRecorder and it’s custom Hypercard stacks soon went to software heaven, and along came a very refined product that used the Mac and it’s internal microphone very well.

Today’s newest revision, called SoundEdit 16 (or SE 16 as it will be referred to), is quite a feature packed program. The application provides you with a set of features that are current with market trends in multimedia and sound design. 

There are four main changes in the program. The first noticeable change is the interface. All the buttons resemble the shareware ‘Greg’s Buttons’ - all drawn in 3D. The windows and dialogs are all refined and clearer to understand. The floating Control Palette offers a set of nine macro buttons that simplify certain editing functions. The palette has a Zoom Box so that you can hide the macro buttons. The ‘Open...’ dialog box is very well designed. You have the option to view or listen to any sound, movie or resource you wish to edit before you open them - essentially an over-glorified preview function, but very useful.

The next powerful addition are the Ruler options. In previous versions of SoundEdit, you could only edit portions of sound and measure them against seconds or milliseconds. So much for professional editing. In SE 16, you now have the ability to change it to one of 6 base units: seconds, minutes and seconds, milliseconds, samples, Frames (NTSC 30, NTSC 29.97, Film, PAL), and SMPTE Timecode. With the addition of Frames and Timecode, Macromedia essentially introduced this program into the professional stream of editing packages. With the impact and usefulness of adding timecode compatibility comes the next main feature of SE 16.

Since every other program out there is QuickTime ready, why can’t SE 16 be as well?
The addition of QuickTime editing and viewing was not simply a fancy feature added on to bolster its presence on the shelves. With timecode and QuickTime sound track editing, it fills the slot for the first affordable professional package on the market to do so. Other packages such as Adobe Premiere are able to combine sound and video, but you are unable to truly edit or modify it beyond Sound Levels or Gain, or even a makeshift Fade-in or Fade-out. The two packages can now complement each other well for low-end broadcast quality footage. You can now go into SE 16 and open QuickTime movies and edit individual sound tracks. When you go to edit a track, the movie will display a set of its frames across the top of the editing window, in relation to peaks and spikes in the sound, shown below it. As you zoom into the sound, you also zoom into individual frames of the movie. Now you can add sounds, edit existing sound tracks, or even create new ones and synchronize them perfectly to the intended movie.

With the advent of AV Macintoshes, Power Macintoshes and the PowerBook 500’s, 16-bit stereo sound digitizing has now found its place as a standard feature. These computers all have the ability to record sounds at CD quality levels, which is 16-bit at 44KHz sampling rate. Some of them are even able to record at DAT (Digital Audio Tape) levels which is 48KHz. We all know how crisp sound samples are from CD, as compared with 8-bit sound clips from previous Macs. In multimedia presentations, 8-bit 11KHz sounds just doesn’t cut it anymore . Most of these media presentations are mastered on CD-ROM or SyQuest cartridges - why try to conserve space with lousy sounds?

SE 16, just like in previous versions, allows you to record sounds from its built-in microphone or CD-ROM player. However, this version allows you to directly tap the power of the AV features found in AV-capable Macs, or AV-supporting third-party NuBus cards. 

With these new features aside, there are still dozens of minor improvements over the previous version of SoundEdit. All 18 of the Editing Filters have been revised and a few new ones have been added as well. The floating Selection palette contains more useful info, and even tracks the location of the cursor. The online Help functions are easier to use and the documentation is very easy to follow. The Spectrum feature is better designed, and less confusing. It’s control dialog offers a variety of professional tools to follow by. All in all, this is an excellent product.

The most surprising addition is its inclusion of a CD-ROM disc packed full of samples, movies, and a copy of the installer. On disc, there is a sound library called ‘The Hollywood Edge™’ that contains over 300 sound samples separated by category. There are also a set of tutorials to help teach you the basics of video sound-editing with the assistance of the manual.

Besides all of these wonderful changes and additions, there are of course a few faults that go with almost every ‘version one-point-oh’ of software. One of the annoying bugs is that Power Macintosh owners are unable to sample from internal CD-ROM. A Macromedia representative assures us that a fix is underway. The lack of a function to trigger your internal CD-ROM from within SE 16 can cause frustration - there should be a way to start, pause and stop your Audio player from the program itself. The lack of MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) controls or a MIDI track editing function still perturbs me. I hope QuickTime 2.0 will address some of those issues.

The only other ‘problem’ with the program is its suggested retail price (SRP). At $530 Canadian, the SRP is too high for the average user. Nearly 1.5 times the price of its predecessor, this puts the package in the small business expense bracket. This will hurt its sales somewhat, but it does seem to point to the fact that Macromedia is placing this product in the professional mainstream.